Samsung’s 4K spinner also sends sound straight to your ears

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Nope. I do not be needing one of these.

Slow down there, Billy Whizz. This isn’t just a DVD player. It’s a hootin’ and tootin’ 4K Blu-ray player, and there are fewer of those than you count on one hand. The Samsung UBD-M9500 is the company’s second such disc-served pixel muncher, after last year’s K8500.

Two words for you: Netflix.

And two words for you: drama. Think about that point in a cinema trip when the lights go down and the screen widens from its humdrum advert-o-aspect to full photon blaster mode. There’s a frisson. Some people might clap or cheer, or even put down their phone. Movies deserve that kind of emotional intro, and you don’t get it from absent-mindedly clicking on a ‘Watch Now’ button. No matter how excitedly the up/down lights on your router flash.

What, and I get ‘drama’ by standing up to put a disc in a shapeless black box?

Uh, it’s not shapeless; it’s curved. And, yes, you do. It makes you think: “I am going to watch a film”. It makes you ask the fam: “Does anyone want to watch a film?” And that’s when, in the resulting stream of grunts, “Whatevs” and “You’re not even my real Dad”, you can employ the M9500’s finest feature: private cinema mode. It’ll stream the audio to a pair of Bluetooth headphones, so you can movie while others around you are glued to their devices, exercising their narcissism and consumerism.

That’d be good in the bedroom.

And not many of us can say that. It has other features, too, including decoders for HDR and Dolby Atmos (sounds awesome), the ability to auto-correct the picture settings on your Samsung TV (sounds annoying) and the ability to up-scale audio to 32-bit (sounds unpossible).

Of course, the main thing is going to be the price, both against its big 4K disc rivals – the excellent Panasonic UB900 and the Xbox One S – and against streamy services such as Netflix and Amazon. And so we can reveal… drum roll… Samsung hasn’t spoken the price yet, nor the release date. There’s drama for you, right there.

About

Fraser used to wear a Psion Series 3 palmtop in a shoulder holster. Perhaps he still does.Either way, his lifelong mission - including fourteen years for Stuff - has been to see whether the consumer electronics industry can ever replicate that kind of cyborgian joy.So far: nope. Despite a plan to combine a action camera and Olympus Eye-Trek goggles to become Man Who Sees The Vision Of A Man Three Inches Taller Than Himself.He also likes mountain bikes, motorbikes, cars, helicopters. Still thinks virtual surround is witchcraft. Dislikes jetskis, despite never having been on one.